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LinuxPlanet: Editor's Note: Exactly how large is the Linux market?

In a study partially sponsored by Microsoft, the market-research
firm Gartner Group estimates that Linux represented less than 9
percent of all server shipments in 2000. This is seemingly at odds
with market research from IDC and AllNetResearch, which report that
Linux has upwards of 35 percent of the server space:

Late last month the Gartner Group released a survey of Linux
system sales, and its conclusions were that Linux accounted for 8.6
percent of all server sales in 2000, with growth to approximately
10 percent of the server market in 2001. Gartner estimates that Red
Hat is involved with the vast majority of these shipments --
upwards of 93 percent -- which are most prevalent in external Web,
internal Web, and infrastructure server situations.

Gartner included both nonbranded (so-called white-box server
purchases) and branded (i.e., Dell, Compaq, VA Linux) server
purchases in its research. When the figures were broken down at
this level, Gartner estimated that the Linux market share among all
branded-server purchases was 6 percent in the third quarter of
2000.